Earlier this week, Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits published one of the worst corporate marketing videos I’ve ever seen to LinkedIn. I actually ripped a copy of it in case somebody at the mega-wholesaler realizes that it’s not ideal to have an executive on tape bragging “a lot of places do kinda give us full loyalty, you can kinda quote-unquote own a bar” after two years’-worth of still-ongoing litigation with the Federal Trade Commission over anticompetitive price-fixing practices. Incredible scenes. Mostly, though, the video is terrible because every SGWS employee in it seems either unreasonably chipper about all the #synergy, or annoyed at being taken hostage by its marketing team. The latter is how Gregg Quadrini, the vice-president and general manager of Massachusetts beer division comes off explaining why drinkers want drinks across different categories. He says:
Today’s consumer is playing in all those different buckets. They call it “zebra,” where people will be drinking an alcoholic beverage and then have a spacer there where they use a non-alcoholic beverage.
Needless to say, they do not call it “zebra.” They call it “zebra-striping,” and really, I don’t think anybody actually uses that term outside of the drinks industry and corresponding media. But lucky for us, Gregg Quadrini doesn’t know that, because he has uttered a phrase that I will be muttering on my deathbed.
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